I agree with it not being surprising. Irish lore ends up a lot like LOTR lore where "first" is really "first except for the people here in he age before we got here" and iterate on that theme for a while.

"If there were enough people in this community that want gigabit broadband to make it viable, some company would do it."

No, due to high startup costs, 1 comany would offer overpriced Internet no matter what the demand was for and in a fashion that only maximizes profits. Internet NEEDS to be a utility for the same reason why basic water needs to be a utility.

Capitalism is great except for the million ways it fails do to anything it promises, and is at its worst when there is no competition.

This is one of those times. You shrink regulation and you shrink beaurocracy, you end up exposing legislature to corporate lobbying and influence (money). There is no competition because no new companies can afford to enter the arena and said lobbying and legislature prevents the public from banding together and forming alternatives like EBP.

The issue is confused. The system is designed to prevent brute forcing, which is what the FBI originally wanted to do, but their recent calls have been for legislation to require tech companies to put in a back door to circumvent the encryption and only accessible by the device creators (yea, good luck with that).

To be fair, the only arguably decent candidate from the DNP this go round is Bernie Sanders, and he is going to lose to Hillary-cesspool-of-lies-and-skeletons-Clinton. Ironically, that's because the black vote is going to a bougie fraud instead of someone who has actually worked for civil rights.

Yea, the GOP has a circus going on, but the DNP has the biggest clown, and she's not funny.

Yea, I was about to say, there are Wheatgrass drinking vegan hippy nutters part of the anti Vax crowd, but there's also a huge number of "don't vax, pray" ultraconservative evangelicals in the crowd as well.

I chose an FX8350 over an i5 because performance was objectively better than the i5 that cost 50% more for the applications that actually exercised my CPU at the time (Planetside 2, BF3/4, and transcoding).

I would have had to buy an i7 at 2x the price to match the FX8350, and why do that when I could use that money to upgrade my graphics card to the point that no Intel processor could have matched the performance increase?

Not everyone is a Saudi Prince, after all. I have a job and a family to feed, and with only $1500 to spend on a gaming rig, why waste money on Intel?